Essays in Criticism Volume 61 Issue 3 2011 [Doi 10.1093%2Fescrit%2Fcgr011] Giles, P. -- Axel's Castle

7/17/2019 Essays in Criticism Volume 61 Issue 3 2011 [Doi 10.1093%2Fescrit%2Fcgr011] Giles, P. -- Axel's Castle

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NEW IMPRESSIONS XV

Axel’s Castle

PAUL GILES

AXEL’S CASTLE, first published in book form in 1931, will beseventy years old in 2011, by which time Edmund Wilson, bornin 1895, will have been dead for thirty-nine years. The passageof Wilson and his work into history offers an opportunity tore-read Axel’s Castle from a distance and thus to considerways in which, perhaps like Samuel Johnson’s Lives of thePoets or Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art , the book isnow less valuable to us as a source of aesthetic insight or philo-

sophical truth than as an indication of ways in which importantwriters were thinking at a particular point in the past. Such a ret-rospective light might also serve usefully to dispel some of theaura which, as Stefan Collini noted recently, has continued tolinger around the ‘fantasy’ image of Wilson as ‘public intellec-tual’, the ‘critic-as-generalist’ who stood up heroically duringthe middle years of the twentieth century to what John Waincharacteristically described as academic forms of ‘narrow

specialization’ that ‘blight every area of our intellectual life’.1

It was this kind of sentimentalisation of Wilson that also ledjournalists such as Clive James and Philip French to revere himfor what would now be called his public ‘impact’: in valorisingwhat James called Wilson’s ‘unconquerable impulse towardscommunity’ and French his capacity to resist the theoreticalmethods of the academy while still remaining ‘scholarly in

[his] cast of mind’, both metropolitan critics were, of course,seeking to annex Wilson as a distinguished precursor to theirown popular reviewing practices.2 Yet it is arguable, I think,

Essays in Criticism Vol. 61 No. 3# The Author [2011]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgr011

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that Wilson’s position in American cultural history is more com-plicated and interesting than this, and that Axel’s Castle, in par-ticular, should properly be understood as one of the formativecritical texts of American literary studies within the academy,a book whose influence has long been obscured by the anoma-lous conditions of its production and reception. In his lecture‘The Historical Interpretation of Literature’, given at Princetonin 1940, Wilson argued the case for ‘interpreting books interms of their historical origins’ rather than, like T. S. Eliot,installing the critic as ‘God’ who ‘calls the books to a Day of

Judgment’, and if such historical relativism is applied reflexivelyto Wilson himself a rather more ambiguous picture of the authorbegins to emerge.3

As Louis Menand has observed, while Wilson is often associ-ated with the New York intellectuals, in part because of his brief marriage to Mary McCarthy in the 1940s, he did not in facthave much in common with them, choosing consistently toidentify himself instead with ‘an older generation’.4 Wilson

spent his college years at Princeton between 1912 and 1916,served (like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway) in theAmbulance Corps in France during the First World War, andthen wrote for various magazines in New York throughoutthe 1920s. He worked for Vanity Fair, whose circulationreached 80,000 in 1920; for the Dial , which first published, in1922, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land along with an essay byWilson explicating the poem; and also for the New Republic,where his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the July 1922issue elicited from the grateful author a letter thanking Wilsonfor his ‘very appreciative and painstaking criticism’.5 It is easyto see how sharp would have been the distinction in Wilson’smind between this vibrant cultural milieu and the supineworld of Princeton, which was, according to Morris Dickstein,‘in many ways far from a serious university’ during the first

two decades of the twentieth century, an institution where ‘thegentleman’s C was a way of life and there was a long traditionbehind it’.6 Although Wilson remained indebted to his under-graduate teacher Christian Gauss, to whom Axel’s Castle is dedi-cated and whose special expertise on Aestheticism and FrenchDecadence exerts an influence all the way through the book,

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there is no doubt that Wilson considered New York the onlypossible location for his literary career after his return fromwartime France. F. O. Matthiessen, born seven years afterWilson, in 1902, subsequently struggled to carve out forhimself an academic career in the field of American literature:he applied in 1925 to do a Ph.D. at Harvard on WaltWhitman, but the authorities there told him that Whitmanwas an exhausted topic and that he would be better advised toconcentrate his energies on Elizabethan translations of Greek,Roman, and French classics. Matthiessen went on heroically in

1941 to subvert Harvard’s anglophile assumptions inAmerican Renaissance, a book that argued explicitly forAmerican nineteenth century writers as being on a par withtheir seventeenth century English forebears; but for the slightlyolder Wilson the world of academia was never a serious careeroption. When Wilson graduated from Princeton there wereonly two university professors of English in the entire UnitedStates who specialised in American literature – Fred Lewis

Pattee at Penn State and William B. Cairns at Wisconsin – andthis neglect was compounded by the condescension of the IvyLeague establishment towards contemporary literature in all of its forms.7 American literature in particular stood in the earlytwentieth century in the same relation to canonical English lit-erature as English itself had stood during the nineteenthcentury to the study of the Greek and Roman classics: amongtraditionalists, the new subject was always considered too soft,too susceptible to merely impressionistic reactions, to beworthy of serious intellectual pursuit. In 1928, Wilson com-plained with typical obstreperousness of how ‘[s]ince the deathof Stuart P. Sherman, who was second-rate at best, there hasnot been a single American critic who regularly occupiedhimself in any authoritative way with contemporary literature’.8

This long-standing academic hostility towards the vulgarities

of contemporary culture was given particular resonance in the1920s by the increasing prominence of the New Humanists,with whom Wilson and his New York contemporaries were inrebarbative dialogue. Centred around Harvard professor IrvingBabbitt and Princeton guru Paul Elmer More, the New Huma-nists laid emphasis upon their own interpretation of classical

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civilisation and what Babbitt described as ‘proportionatenessthrough a cultivation of the law of measure’.9 In the criticalanthology Humanism and America (1930), editor NormanFoerster defined humanism as involving ‘a resolute distinctionbetween man and nature and between man and the divine’,and he declared humanists to be more ‘academic’ in their orien-tation than ‘workaday journalist critics’ since they were com-mitted to exploring ‘a wisdom deeper than that of themarket-place’.10 Foerster was also one of the pioneers in theacademic professionalisation of American literature, having

edited in 1928 another anthology of essays, The Reinterpretationof American Literature, in which he similarly expressed regret athow the subject had so far been left to ‘facile journalists andignorant dilettanti’ and called instead for ‘a change in spiritand method [which] will involve a reinterpretation of ourliterary history’.11 There was also an overlap between the contri-butors to these two volumes, with Harry Hayden Clark of theUniversity of Wisconsin declaring in 1928 that there was ‘a

crying need for at least one learned journal devoted exclusivelyto publishing material on American literature’, and outliningin 1930 the mythic conception of an American arcadia thatwould be consonant with how ‘great art has always beenorganic with and supported by the life and vision of a wholepeople’. Such utopian designs led Clark in the latter essays toevoke a spectre that was to haunt Americanist criticism overthe next half-century: ‘When such scholar-critics have developedsuch a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope’, hewrote, ‘we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is towrite for us the great American novel’.12

Wilson’s essays on literature and culture in the 1920s aretaking issue both with the tenets of New Humanism and withthe reification of American literature, great American noveland all, as ‘a popular unanimity of hope’. For Wilson, such hor-

tatory exercises in popular pedagogy were associated in variousways with what he took to be the desiccated world of higher edu-cation, and part of his self-definition as a writer during the 1920sinvolved an escape from such strictures. Wilson himself had beena contemporary (and competitor) of Scott Fitzgerald at Prince-ton, and his portrait was included, along with those of




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Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, and Stephen VincentBene ´t, in a 1922 Vanity Fair tribute to ‘The New Generation inLiterature’. It is, then, abundantly clear that Wilson’s early ambi-tions centred upon being recognised as a creative writer respond-ing to changing times rather than merely as a critic expoundingthe American heritage. As early as 1919, Fitzgerald had writtento Wilson telling him to ‘write a novel and don’t waste your timeediting collections’, warning him that editorial work ‘will get tobe a habit’; it was only later that Wilson came ruefully toacknowledge how his own attempts at fiction could never

match ‘the vividness and excitement and the technicalaccuracy’ of something like The Great Gatsby.13 Fitzgerald’sfamous study of criminal obsession also takes issue explicitlywith the New Humanist emphasis on ‘proportionateness’through Nick Carraway’s declaration in the novel’s firstchapter that the idea of a ‘well-rounded man’ is the ‘mostlimited of all specialists’ and that ‘life is much more successfullylooked at from a single window, after all’. In his own critical

comments on Fitzgerald, Wilson was quick to identify how hisfriend’s ‘partly Irish’ ethnic provenance and links to ‘theMiddle West of large cities and country clubs’ made the authorsomething of an outsider within the world of East Coast elitesthat his books describe.14 At Fitzgerald’s request, Wilsonoffered detailed suggestions on the text of The Beautiful and Damned , and he helped the author achieve in Gatsby the tran-sition ‘from a loose and subjective conception of the novel’,something Wilson had specifically critiqued in his commentson the ‘preposterous farrago’ of This Side of Paradise (1920),‘to an organized impersonal one’.15 Wilson would later creditGauss’s Princeton lectures on Dante and Flaubert with havinghelped Fitzgerald achieve this kind of artistic discipline, but,according to Lewis B. Dabney, it was Wilson’s own editorialcommentaries that were the more important influence on

Fitzgerald.16

Indeed, it would not be going too far to say thatWilson played the kind of mentoring role for Fitzgerald thatEzra Pound played around the same time for T. S. Eliot, in hisclinical metamorphosis of The Waste Land from ‘just a pieceof rhythmical grumbling’, in Eliot’s self-deprecating phrase,to a more austere neoclassical monument.17 After Fitzgerald’s

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early death, Wilson also edited his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941) as well as his collection of essays The Crack-Up (1945), both of which were profoundly to help shapeFitzgerald’s posthumous reputation.

At the same time, for all his iconoclasm and commitment tocontemporary culture, Wilson also had one foot in the tradition-alists’ camp. His eulogistic tribute after Gauss’s death in 1951suggests a love-hate relationship to his alma mater, withWilson celebrating his ‘great teacher’ as ‘part of that goodeighteenth-century Princeton’. Gauss’s easy familiarity with a

vast range of subjects, said Wilson, indicated ‘fidelity to a kindof truth that is rendered by the discipline of aesthetic form, asdistinct from that of the professional moralist’.18 In this wayWilson sharply differentiated Gauss from his fellow Prince-tonian, Paul Elmer More, in whom, said Wilson in a 1937obituary, the ‘moralist’ triumphed over the ‘poet’: Gauss,declared Wilson, was ‘much subtler a mind than More, withso much wider a range of imaginative sympathy, and corre-

spondingly so much less fixed in his opinions’.19

One revealingdimension of this is the way Wilson takes Gauss’s aestheticism– the latter had known Oscar Wilde in Paris during the 1890s,and kept a dog called Baudelaire – to represent an escapefrom the more constricting moral landscapes of America in the1920s. But another significant aspect is the way Wilson clearlylooks back to the academic world as a source of intellectual per-spective and integrity: he was always attracted, even as early as1922, to the idea of a place ‘whither I can retreat and derivestrength from contact with the classics’, and one of the ironiesof Wilson’s critical achievement is that it emerged from a para-doxical criss-cross between the worlds of urban immersion andpastoral withdrawal. This was true all the way through hiscareer: when he was in the Soviet Union on a Guggenheim in1935 researching To the Finland Station, he read Marx and

Engels during the day but Gibbon by night, saying later thathe liked the eighteenth century historian’s ‘lofty, unperturbedand perfectly cool point-of-view’ on human affairs, and that ‘itwas really Gibbon who pulled me through’.20

Such a sense of stylistic hybridity, oscillating between journal-istic and academic vantage points, is developed in Wilson’s early




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work to embrace a systematic aesthetic of contradiction, where itis the interaction between street burlesque and classical form thatdefines the tenor of his art. Wilson wrote several appreciativeessays on New York burlesque theatre in the 1920s – hisacquaintances E. E. Cummings and Hart Crane were alsodevotees of burlesque performance – and in his essay collectionThe Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties, Wilson’s piece on the Minsky Brothers’ Follies isdirectly preceded by his illuminating 1927 essay ‘A Preface toPersius: Maudlin Meditations in a Speakeasy’. Here Wilson

portrays himself alone in a New York diner reading an eight-eenth century edition of Persius, the Roman author who livedin the crime-ridden era of Nero and who consequently expressedhimself ‘confusedly, inelegantly and obscenely’. By drawingattention to the inconsistencies between Persius’s inchoate styleand the tamer idiom of eighteenth century editor WilliamDrummond, who blandly criticises Persius for his lack of ‘elegance’ and ‘urbanity’, Wilson draws attention to the dis-

crepancies between the actual stuff of classical history and theway it has been domesticated by American neoclassical tra-ditions.21 Through highlighting the similar confusions andfollies of his own day – the provision of illegal wine and the bois-terous presence of Cummings in the speakeasy, along with argu-ments over the impending execution of Italian Americananarchists Sacco and Vanzetti – Wilson seeks to present thechaotic scene of New York in the 1920s as a critique both of New Humanist complacency and also of its unwarranted appro-priation of classical history for narrow ideological purposes.Wilson represents burlesque as something like an ontologicalcondition, where abstract ideals are brought low by the compul-sive nature of material desire, but he simultaneously uses thisclassical model of Persius to reposition the New York speakeasywithin an archetypal framework, thereby seeking intellectually

to authenticate a common language, as Joyce did in Ulysses,through linking it analogically with mythological prototypes.It is within this kind of polemical context that Wilson’s essay

on Joyce and the other authors he treats in Axel’s Castle shouldbe situated. The Joyce chapter was first published in the NewRepublic in December 1929, having been preceded in that

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journal by the Yeats, Vale ´ry, and Eliot chapters the previousautumn, and by the general introduction on Symbolism inMarch 1929; the complete book in its revised version wasbrought out by Scribner’s in February 1931, and it has hardlybeen out of print since. Wilson’s most obvious contribution inthis work was to focus on modern writers – two American,two Irish, two French – with the kind of critical intensity heclaimed had been sadly lacking in modern American letters.Five of the six authors to whom he allocates an individualchapter in Axel’s Castle (Yeats, Vale ´ry, Eliot, Joyce, Stein)

were still alive at the time of the book’s publication – the excep-tion was Proust, who had died in 1922 – although DianaTrilling, as if to indicate how obscure such writers still were atthis time, recalled that in 1927, two years out of RadcliffeCollege, she had not so much as heard of Proust, Yeats, orEliot.22 In this sense, Wilson sought forcefully in this book tomap out a legitimate field of study, to justify contemporary lit-erature against the reactionary impulses of New Humanists

such as More, who in a 1930 essay review of Foerster’sHumanism in America had taken issue with many examples of modern art – the ‘clever futilities of an Aldous Huxley’, ‘theobscene rigmarole of a James Joyce’, the ‘intellectual defeatand spiritual dismay’ of Proust – which he saw as liable todebase the moral conviction that human beings are ‘endowedwith the potentiality of free will and answerable for our choiceof good or evil’.23 After the Second World War, as AndreasHuyssen has remarked, such was the tranquillising force of thecanonisation process, the translation of modernist icons intoepitomes of cultural prestige and value within the ‘liberal-conservative consensus’ of the 1950s, that it has subsequentlybecome all too easy to lose sight of how controversial andincendiary such artists often seemed to the public when theyfirst appeared.24

One way in which Wilson in Axel’s Castle deflects attentionfrom received ethical precepts to the more creative confusionsof the aesthetic realm is by relating the emergence of contempor-ary literature to earlier conflicts between Romanticism and clas-sicism. The book takes its title from Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s longdramatic poem Axel , published in 1890, whose protagonist




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hoards in his castle various precious jewels, and its dominant tra-jectory involves tracing parallels between what Wilson describesas ‘Symbolism’, rooted in the aestheticism of the late nineteenthcentury, and the ‘Naturalism’ he regards as more characteristicof twentieth century forms of literary realism. ‘The literaryhistory of our time’, he writes, ‘is to a great extent that of thedevelopment of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Nat-uralism’, and he goes on to say that ‘Symbolism has alreadyrejoined Naturalism, in one great work of literature,Ulysses’.25 One corollary to Wilson’s interpretation of Sym-

bolism as a broad cultural movement was a scepticism aboutthe purist understanding, something attributed here to PaulVale ´ry, of poetry as an aesthetic world set apart; Wilson associ-ates such fetishisation of form with Vale ´ry’s ‘pretentious andsnobbish side’ (AC , p. 69), while conversely he describes Joyceas ‘comparable to the great poets rather than to most of thegreat novelists’, indeed as ‘the great poet of a new phase of the human consciousness’ (AC , p. 176). Fitzgerald had evokedthe style of Aestheticism as a similarly amorphous phenomenonin This Side of Paradise, but of course such broad-brush versionsof cultural history, along with the denial of any innate formalspecificity to poetry, did not endear Wilson to the NewCritics, who began to become more prominent in the 1930s:Cleanth Brooks, for example, accused Axel’s Castle in 1939 of trying always to reduce the complex organism of a poem to a

‘doctrine of communication’ that might readily be para-phrased.26 It is, however, part of Wilson’s dialectical purpose,in his argument with More and others, to show (for example)how much Proust ‘has in common’ with George Eliot(AC , p. 129), so that twentieth century literature can be seento emerge through an intertextual process of continuity as wellas rupture. In this way, Wilson seeks to normalise the radical

nature of modern ‘imaginative literature’ by linking it back toits Victorian forebears. Whereas recent criticism has moreoften been concerned to relate the genealogy of modernism syn-chronically to a general cultural condition of modernity, forWilson, crucially influenced as he was by Gauss and Princeton,diachronic associations between Anglo-American experimental

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writing and its late nineteenth century ancestry – the Paris of Decadence, Yellow Book, and all – were equally significant.

There are many local observations in Axel’s Castle testifyingto Wilson’s critical acuity, notably the way he recognises howW. B. Yeats has developed from ‘merely . . . one of the best of the English lyric poets of the nineties’ to ‘the unmistakablestature of a master’ (AC , p. 33), a judgement that is common-place now but was remarkable then. While the originality of such an assessment is compelling, its authority derives not somuch from any specific reading of Yeats, after the manner of

Cleanth Brooks, but rather from Wilson’s capacity to compareliterary value across an extensive range of time and space.There is, from this perspective, an inherently detached,analytical aspect built into Wilson’s account of modernwriting, and it may not be purely coincidental that his citationof Mallarme ´ in the opening essay ‘Symbolism’ – ‘Donner unsens plus pur’, he had written in a sonnet on Poe, ‘aux motsde la tribu’ (AC , p. 16) – anticipates Eliot’s line in ‘Little

Gidding’ (1942), which similarly steps back retrospectively tosituate the modern movement within a longue dure e of historicalconsciousness:

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled usTo purify the dialect of the tribeAnd urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for ageTo set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.27

Eliot, who contributed an essay to Foerster’s 1930 anthologyHumanism and America, was acquainted personally withWilson even though they were not natural allies, but thelatter’s essay in Axel’s Castle astutely picks up the ‘essentiallydramatic quality of [Eliot’s] imagination’ (AC , p. 90), and, at a

time well before the verse dramas, perceptively calls him‘really a dramatic poet’ (AC , p. 91). Wilson has little time forEliot’s emphasis on ‘pure and rare aesthetic essence’, callingthe attempt to read poetry in a technocratic manner a laI. A. Richards ‘absolutely unhistorical’ (AC , p. 96), and healso rejects what he takes to be the ‘pedantry’ of Eliot’s




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attempts formally to dissociate prose ‘from the artificiallyrestricted field of verse’ (AC , p. 98); but he still salutes him ‘asa man passionately interested in literature’ (AC , p. 100) andacknowledges how his powerful learning has had ‘the effect of discrediting the academic cliche ´s of the text-books’ (AC ,p. 94). Matthiessen, who published an early book onT. S. Eliot in 1935, described Wilson’s chapter on Eliot inAxel’s Castle as ‘less satisfactorily rounded than those on Joyce and Proust since he is seemingly not as sensitive to thenature of poetry as to that of prose’; nevertheless, Matthiessen

continued, ‘as with everything Wilson writes, this essay hasthe rare quality of persevering honesty, the determination tostate exactly what he has perceived, which makes him themost valuable of contemporary critics in this country’.28

Since Matthiessen was the pre-eminent academic critic of American literature in the twentieth century, his endorsementof Wilson here is particularly noteworthy and valuable.Though he identifies potential flaws in Wilson’s theoretical

approach, Matthiessen also admires his strenuous attempt tofigure out aspects of Eliot’s work that may not be obvious tothe common reader. Such recognition of Wilson’s ‘persevering’qualities is rather different in tone from the usual approbationof Wilson as a purveyor of stout common sense, what Dicksteincalled ‘no-nonsense directness’; Frank Kermode similarlypraised Wilson as ‘a master of summary’, something Kermodeassociated with his ‘commitment to public life’, through bookreviewing and so on.29 But although poise and pithiness werecertainly one aspect of Wilson’s critical charisma – he describedHarry Morgan, hero of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not ,as resembling ‘Popeye the Sailor in the animated cartoon’without the plausible explanation ‘that he does it all onspinach’ – there is also a more sombre and thoughtful side toWilson’s work that seeks to get behind such journalistic

epigrams.30

The most obvious example is the brilliant essay onCharles Dickens that opens The Wound and the Bow (1947),where Wilson redeems Dickens from his domesticated situationas ‘a familiar joke, a favorite dish’ among the English middleclasses by elucidating instead the darker, more obsessive and‘hysterical’ side to Dickens’s writing.31 But this explicitly

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psychoanalytical approach, which indirectly influenced muchqueer criticism later in the twentieth century, is anticipated inAxel’s Castle, which consistently raises Freudian spectres inorder to interrogate flatter assumptions of a unitary subject.Thus, Proust, with the ‘perversity’ of his ‘sadism’ (AC , p. 144),is according to Wilson ‘a perfect case for psychoanalysis’ (AC ,p. 146), with his ‘researches . . . running curiously close toFreud’ (AC , p. 151); Joyce in Ulysses shows ‘a unique geniusfor the representation of special psychological states’ (AC ,p. 179); Gertrude Stein’s work introduces us to the ‘mysteries

of human psychology’ (AC , p. 200), and so on. There is, inother words, a critical interest on Wilson’s part in the enigmatic,in what lies partially hidden, and this is commensurate also withhis interest during the 1920s in A. N. Whitehead’s scientificmodels of relativity, according to which nothing in thematerial world was ever quite all that it seemed. According toRonald Berman, ‘[t]here is perhaps no more important influenceon Wilson than Whitehead’s idea that the varieties of experience

cannot be understood through any single scientific model’, andin this sense it is not difficult to understand how his views of aes-thetic flux and historical relativism coalesce in his understandingof modern culture as a form of perennial process, haunted bywhat Berman calls ‘the inability of language to state at anygiven time that reality had been captured, formulated, andpinned to a wall’.32

This is another version of ontological burlesque, whose gov-erning premise is that high abstract ideals necessarily falsifyreality in manifold ways. Wilson, that is to say, uses thelanguages of psychoanalysis and science to project in Axel’sCastle alternative versions of a cultural condition, the moststriking aspect of which lies in its very resistance to philosophicalclosure. He is perceptive about ‘Joyce’s attempts to write thelanguage of dreams’ (AC , p. 181) in the work that was later to

become Finnegans Wake, an experiment linked here to‘Freud’s researches into the principles which govern thelanguage actually spoken in dreams’ (AC , p. 182), and heincludes ‘three versions of a passage from James Joyce’s newnovel’ as an appendix to Axel’s Castle (AC , p. 239). He also dis-cusses as ‘a queer special development of Symbolism’ the




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writings of Dadaists such as Lautre ´amont, to whose anarchictemper Wilson generally gives short shrift, dismissing Dada gen-erally as ‘systematic comic nonsense’ (AC , p. 202). It is, however,one of the particular virtues of Axel’s Castle that it gives discur-sive space even to ideas with which the author finds himself unsympathetic, and another of his appendices here reprintsTristan Tzara’s ‘Memories of Dadaism’, as if deliberately toallow within the book counternarratives to those proposed byWilson himself. This again suggests the accessibility of Axel’sCastle to creative forms of fissuring, while the larger structural

contradiction in this work turns upon the relationship betweenaesthetics and politics: having started out in his introductorychapter with a cultural justification of the Symbolistmovement, the author finds himself pressed in the finalchapter by the question of ‘whether it is possible to make a prac-tical success of human society, and whether, if we continue tofail, a few masterpieces, however profound or noble, will beable to make life worth living even for the few people in a

position to enjoy them’ (AC , p. 232). This anticipates theMarxist perspectives Wilson explored during the 1930s, culmi-nating in To the Finland Station, but it also testifies to theinherent capacity of Wilson’s critical texts for internal self-contradiction. Wilson drafted the first chapter of Axel’s Castleat a sanatorium near Syracuse, New York, after suffering anervous breakdown in 1929, and, as with The Waste Land , aresidual strand of psychological fragmentation coexists in provo-cative ways with this book’s more public face of orotundauthority.

Michael North, in Reading 1922, wrote of how burlesque canbe seen as ‘a key term at this distinct moment in the history of literary modernism’ because it raises crucial questions aboutthe valence of both ‘the obscene’ and social ‘censorship’, andWilson’s critical treatise is particularly responsive to the multi-

layered aspects of the works he talks about, their capacity tooscillate between the conventional and the transgressive.33 Atthe end of the Proust chapter, for example, he relates Proust’s‘emotional idealism and its ultimate analysis and readjustment’(AC , p. 151) to explorations of how memorialisation operatesin recent American fiction: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,

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Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Thornton Wilder’s TheBridge of San Luis Rey, the sketches of Dorothy Parker.Another of the strengths of Axel’s Castle is thus its comparativereach, its capacity to forge links among the various literary tra-ditions of America, England, and France, and consequently toavoid the kind of parochialism that was, in the shadow of theFirst World War, beginning to identify the subject of American literature with a specifically patriotic spirit. Wilsonanalyses Hemingway’s ‘debt’ to the Parisian world of GertrudeStein and shows how the extravagantly abstruse dimensions of

linguistic experimentation find their way, in attenuated form,into the more realistic channels of modern American fiction,with Hemingway drawing on Stein’s stylistic rhythms ‘incertain passages of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell toArms, where he wants to catch the slow rhythm of time or theominous banality of human behavior in situations of emotionalstrain’ (AC , p. 201). In this way, Wilson effectively democratisesthe high art of Symbolism, releasing it from Axel’s enclosed cas-

tellated space by demonstrating how such forms work their wayinto popular culture through a dynamic interaction with themore naturalistic elements of the contemporary novel. Wilsonhimself was no slouch when it came to dreaming up counter-cultural art forms, devising in 1926 a ‘great super-ballet of New York’, to be called ‘Chronkite’s Clocks’, intended tofeature Charlie Chaplin, typewriters, alarm-clocks and all theother sounds of the city, an idea that Chaplin himself justlaughed at. Nevertheless, true to his patrician background,Wilson also remained sceptical about some of the more extrava-gant claims made on behalf of popular culture by New Yorkcritics of this era: in a 1924 review of Gilbert Seldes’s TheSeven Lively Arts, for example, Wilson rebuked the editor of The Dial for what he called his ‘wildly inappropriate’ invocationof Krazy Kat as, in Seldes’s provocative phrase, ‘our most satis-

factory work of art’.34

Indeed, the title of Wilson’s collectionThe Shores of Light is taken from a phrase found in Virgil andLucretius about souls in the underworld yearning for a life lostto them forever, implying again the author’s desire to organisehis cultural responses to the 1920s within the discipline of a clas-sical framework and so to bring highbrow and lowbrow together




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in what D. H. Lawrence, using a characteristically modernistphrase in a different context, referred to as a ‘trembling instabil-ity of the balance’.35 Wilson, who met Lawrence at a party inNew York in 1923, called the English novelist’s Studies inClassic American Literature ‘one of the few first-rate booksthat have ever been written on the subject’, and he influentiallyreprinted all of it in his anthology of American literature TheShock of Recognition (1943), a decision that again suggestshow Wilson’s aesthetic sensibility was attuned to expansiveand comparative rather than narrowly nationalistic view-

points.36

In a 1927 entry in his notebook, Wilson declaredthat ‘only the works of art – which, like the phagocytes, havereally ingested the hostile bacteria, the source of the inflam-mation, the disturbance of the system’s equilibrium – are impor-tant and valuable’, and whereas academic Americanists such asClark were hankering at this time after the serenities of anorganic form that they associated with the national state itself,Wilson, by contrast, was most responsive to the idea of literature

as what he called ‘the result of continual stress and strain in theuniversal organism’.37 Far from simply reproducing a set of moral values or cultural orthodoxies, Wilson saw it as hiscritical responsibility to bring clashing forces – America andEurope, highbrow and lowbrow, Symbolism and Naturalism –into vibrant juxtaposition.

Wilson was working on his novel I Thought of Daisy (1929)in the late 1920s, at the same time as he was writing Axel’sCastle; the latter, he said, ‘being literary criticism, is easier todo, and in the nature of a relief, from Daisy’.38 Wilson’sfiction is, in truth, a mixed bag, full of self-conscious theorisingabout art and music, along with a barrage of sexual encounters;Raymond Chandler complained that in Memoirs of HecateCounty (1946) Wilson made ‘fornication as dull as a railroadtimetable’, although John Updike was more partial to the

book, first reading it as a teenager and welcoming the realisticrepresentation of sex on ‘actual worn furniture’. But, asUpdike went on to observe, what was most productive aboutWilson’s fiction was the way it ‘greatly enriched’ his criticism,and I Thought of Daisy incorporates a pronounced sense of intellectual mobility, with the unnamed narrator directing

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irony back against himself in his pursuit of the heroine, a formerburlesque performer.39 At one point he tries to take a leaf out of the New Humanists’ book by turning to Sophocles, but withinthe mundane world of Coney Island he finds the ancientGreek’s wisdom unhelpful: ‘I seemed to myself a figure fromthe funny-papers: Mr Suburban America, at the seaside, withpackages and a straw hat’.40 All of this illustrates again the self-subverting idiom that distinguishes Axel’s Castle, since sex forWilson always involved an aspect of unpredictability, of experi-ential desire exceeding rigid preconceptions or philosophical cat-

egories. A similarly destabilising factor that ran throughWilson’s life and art was alcohol, and again this was somethinghe cherished for intellectual as much as sensual reasons. He wasa prolific drinker, someone who would order six martinis at atime; but there was always method in such madness, andindeed such proclivities were entirely characteristic of theAmerican Prohibition era of the 1920s, when alcohol wasused consistently by ambitious writers – Fitzgerald, Crane,

Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner – to induce altered states of consciousness. Arguing that ‘reactions to Prohibition were onesource of American literary modernism’, Thomas B. Gilmoredrew a useful parallel between its willed disruption of ‘common-place reality’ and the opium experiments of De Quincey andothers during the Romantic period.41 Wilson’s alcoholic ten-dencies were an enabling mechanism allowing him systemati-cally to explore an idea of the loss of control, a crossing of Enlightenment rationalism with the kind of strategic irrational-ism that was, as we have seen, endemic to his burlesque con-sciousness. Wilson would characteristically turn alcohol itself into a charade, and he once referred punningly to ‘This Side of Paralyzed’ by ‘F. Scotch Fitzgerald’.42

Prohibition in the United States ended in 1933, and Wilsonwas feeling temperamentally displaced as soon as the late

1930s, confiding at this time to his journal of how he felt likehe was still ‘a man of the twenties. I am still expecting somethingexciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing,uninhibited exchange of ideas’. This was a sentiment he repeatedverbatim in the last work published during his own lifetime,Upstate (1971).43 In 1944, after the death of Fitzgerald, he




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similarly reflected in more analytic vein on how ‘[t]here hascome a sort of break in the literary movement that was beginningto feel its first strength in the years 1912-16, at the time I was incollege at Princeton: the movement on which I grew up and withwhich I afterwards worked’.44 Such retrospective categorisationsare prime examples of Wilson applying his own historicistmethod to himself, and although he did valuable work in hislater years he never again felt quite as much at home as hehad in the New York of the 1920s. To the Finland Stationalmost entirely ignores the ideology of Marxism, supposedly

its central theme, in the way it integrates revolutionary leadersinto a normative biographical framework – referring to Leninas a ‘great headmaster’, and so on – and it ends up with abizarre burlesque sketch first published in the Partisan Reviewwhere, like something out of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties,Wilson’s pantomime version of Hegel voices his opinion toMarx that ‘We must all believe in the Dialectic on a lovelysummer morning like this!’45 After the Second World War,

Wilson became increasingly uncomfortable with Americansociety in all its manifestations, refusing to contribute toRobert E. Spiller’s Literary History of the United States (1948)and vituperatively expressing his disdain for the bureaucracieshe believed were taking control of the country’s culture indus-tries. Perhaps rather surprisingly for someone so sympatheticto popular culture in the 1920s, he had nothing whatever of interest to say about cinema, dismissing Hollywood as nomore than a corporate conspiracy. He did publish in 1962Patriotic Gore, an account of literature from the AmericanCivil War handled again in a primarily biographical manner,with a deliberately heterodox introduction that casts doubt onall professed national ‘war aims’; clearly, he was seeking hereto draw an equation between Lincoln’s manipulation of publicopinion in the 1860s and what he took to be the Cold War

rhetoric of a hundred years later.46

Wilson also published in1968, four years before his death, two diatribes in theNew York Review of Books against ‘the bureaucracies of theMLA, abetted by their allies in Washington’, where he castigatedthe ‘academic pedantry’ he believed such ‘monomaniac bibli-ographers’ to represent.47 These final essays have not stood

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well the test of time, in part because Wilson’s particular targetshere – the Northwestern University Press edition of HermanMelville’s works, and Franklin R. Rogers’s textual scholarshipon Mark Twain – have proved invaluable to scholars over thepast forty years. In his fulminations on how ‘no ordinaryreader knows or cares’ about such academic specialisation,and in his lapse into the East Coast snobbery of finding it ‘unfor-tunate that so many of these MLA volumes should be productsof the Middle West’, we find Wilson at his curmudgeonly worst,a beached whale of a critic trading off nostalgia for an earlier,

less professionalised era.48

The anomaly of Wilson’s current marginal status within theacademy arises from the way his work has become associatedalmost exclusively with the reactionary aspect of these lateryears, with the result that he has accumulated admirers blind,or even at times hostile in principle, to the originality and signifi-cance of his earlier work. Isaiah Berlin recalled a visit by Wilsonto Oxford in 1954, when Wilson drunkenly mistook John

Bayley for Humphry House and launched ‘a sweeping attackon academic life and academics in general as murderers of allthat was living and real in literature and art’, a denunciationthat induced Berlin ‘fervently’ to concur with him in denouncing‘the modern tendency toward purely literary scholarship’ asinvolving a ‘deliberate ignoring of the texture of the writer’slife and society’.49 It was a similar kind of intellectual nostalgiafor older biographical modes that led Wilson, at a party given byHarry Levin around the same time, to rage at poet and scholarDonald Hall, who had told Wilson he was working on theprosody of modernist poetry, only to be greeted with theriposte: ‘Never use that filthy disgusting word in my presence’.As Hall tells the story: ‘For a moment I did not know butwhat ‘prosody’ was the offending word, but I soon discoveredthat it was “modernist”.’50 Wilson loathed the idea of writers

he had known personally being categorised by academic indus-tries under the ‘modernist’ label, and such visceral hostilitytowards what he took to be dehumanising critical jargon ledhim after the Second World War towards increasingly reaction-ary and at times eccentric literary judgements, as he expressedgreat admiration for the likes of Max Beerbohm, Compton




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Mackenzie, and Evelyn Waugh: the early novels of Waugh,Wilson pointedly remarked in 1944, ‘are the only thingswritten in England that are comparable to Fitzgerald andHemingway’, and in 1962 he bizarrely described Waugh’sOrdeal of Gilbert Pinfold as ‘the greatest Protestant allegorysince Pilgrim’s Progress’.51 After its own lights Patriotic Gorewas an impressive enough achievement, and the book clearlyhas some analogies to Axel’s Castle in the way it seeks to mapout a neglected literary field by bringing Civil War writingback within a more general purview. But while Wilson was

the first properly to identify the Symbolist trajectory of the1920s, he was a belated entrant into the lists of Civil Warscholarship, with Harvard professor Perry Miller observingsardonically that Wilson wrote about figures such as SidneyLanier and George W. Cable as if nobody had ever heard of them before.52 Whereas Axel’s Castle had an immediate and for-mative influence on the construction of the early twentiethcentury canon, with Wilson being a participant in this cultural

world as well as an observer of it, it would be fair to say thatPatriotic Gore, although valuable, constituted only a relativelyminor intervention within the more extensive domain of CivilWar historiography.

In many other critical aspects, however, Wilson was ahead of the game. He had a great facility for mastering foreign languages– having studied Greek, Latin, and western European languagesat school, he added Russian and Hebrew in middle age and Hun-garian in his later years – and this helped him always to bring aninformed comparative perspective to literary study. In 1952,when working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wilson wrote that hewas trying ‘to concentrate synoptically, as they say of theGospels, to bring into one system the literatures of severalcultures which have not always been in close communication,which in some cases have been hardly aware of one another’;

this anticipates the ‘planetary’ turn in twenty-first century Amer-icanist criticism, the move to relate American literature to worldliterature rather than regarding it as contained narrowly withinits own nationalist orbit.53 As early as 1949, after a trip toHaiti, Wilson predicted that the next flowering of Frenchpoetry would be in the Caribbean, and this again foreshadows

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the ‘hemispheric’ dimension that has since become common-place in American studies.54 It was also Wilson’s experience of Russia in the 1930s that was instrumental in his important reap-praisal of Dickens, since he displaced the English writer from hisVictorian context and re-read him within a less familiar trans-national framework, as ‘Dostoevsky’s master’. This essay wasdedicated ‘To the Students of English 354, University of Chicago, Summer 1939’, and Wilson also served in 1959-60as Lowell Professor of English at Harvard, where he taught aseminar in comparative literature as well as lecturing on Civil

War writing.55

Wilson, was, in other words, never quite sohostile to the groves of academe as, in his more drunkenmoods, he liked to convey the impression of being. Conse-quently, the familiar complaint sounded in his 2004 review of a new edition of Axel’s Castle by American scholar SvenBirkerts, about how ‘since Wilson’s day literature has beenannexed by academia and subdivided into dozens of districts,little polities ruled over by professors and irradiated with one

or another kind of jargon’ with ‘the generalist. . .

stripped of authority and banished to the far provinces’, serves unhelpfullyto obscure crucial historical factors circumscribing the formationof the larger intellectual projects to which Wilson was com-mitted.56 Birkerts, like many other conservative commentators,cherishes the image of the later, reactionary, Wilson, but of course in the 1920s the latter was regarded by the New Huma-nists and others as a dangerous radical, a trailblazer for the newstyles of writing that were then thought to be upending all theold moral pieties. What happened subsequently, however, wasthat Foerster and his acolytes came to take control of the insti-tutional formation of American literature, with the result thatmythic treatises on the ‘American Adam’ and so on becamecommonplace and the focus on material culture that had charac-terized Wilson’s work of the 1920s became marginalized.57

Indeed, it is one of the oddities of American literary historythat so few of its home-based modernist writers wrote any sub-stantial literary criticism: although of course Eliot and Pound inLondon were prolific, one looks in vain for significant contri-butions from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, or Crane. Theresult of this is that the American artistic consciousness of the




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1920s has, in institutional terms, remained largely occluded andhas not played as significant a role in the formation of the subjectas one might have expected. This is an oddity of the way the fieldof American literature has come historically to constitute itself,but it is also one of the reasons the significance of Axel’sCastle has tended to be underestimated. The book’s comparativescope turned out to be antipathetic to the nationalist instincts of American literary criticism in the 1930s, and its relativistembrace of inner contradiction and what one might call a perfor-mative Freudianism turned out to be anathema to the moralis-

ing, uplifting rhetoric of American myth and symbolscholarship in the Cold War era.Wilson’s quarrel, then, was not so much with the academy

itself, but with particular scholarly developments that had theeffect of displacing his own intellectual concerns. There are of course other examples of major literary and cultural critics inthe mid-twentieth century whose work was, for variousreasons, undertaken mostly outside the academy: W. E. B. Du

Bois and Walter Benjamin come to mind. But Van WyckBrooks’s commendation of Wilson, when presenting him in1955 with the gold medal for essays and criticism of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, as ‘a vanishing type,the free man of letters’ – where the adjective ‘free’ impliesfreedom from the institutional matrix of universities, as well assuggesting American political freedom – appears sentimentallymisleading.58 Wilson was, in fact, no more an advocate of philo-sophical freedom than he was an apologist for American liberalvalues. The biographer Leon Edel, a not untypical representativeof traditional American humanist criticism in the years after theSecond World War, described Wilson shortly after his death ashaving always been ‘aware that he carried within a subversive persona, a kind of chronic presence, or call it a wound whichat times negated his highest impulses’; but though Edel

regarded such debasement of Wilson’s ‘highest impulses’ asnegatively inducing ‘guile and indirection’ along with ‘subterra-nean distress’, it was in fact part of the unusual power of Wilson’s criticism, as of Fitzgerald’s novels or Crane’smock-epic poetry, self-consciously to bring corruption andidealism, alcoholic torment and what Gatsby calls the ‘green

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breast of the new world’, into evocative if unstable alignment.59

Peter Wollen wrote in 1993 of how ‘the history of modernism iscaught between visionary utopianism’ and ‘sense of civicpurpose’ on the one hand and ‘a fascination with the urban ver-nacular’ on the other, and if American criticism of modernistwriting has tended generally to place much more emphasis onutopian abstraction, it is the genius of Axel’s Castle to bringboth sides of this equation into juxtaposition, to relate itsscoping of Symbolism to what Wollen describes as ‘theunplanned and chaotic’ nature of the modern environment.

Even while generally unsympathetic to Wilson’s methods,Stanley Edgar Hyman in 1948 appropriately compared Axel’sCastle to Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920) as a volume of critical essays that helped to shape the direction of modern litera-ture.60 Like Eliot’s collection, Wilson’s book may now appear tobe unduly idiosyncratic and partial, even though many of itsindividual judgements of authors still appear strikingly sound;but as a work of cultural history, whose author engaged

actively with the scenes that he described and so effectivelybrought modern literature for the first time into the publicdomain, Axel’s Castle remains indispensable.

University of Sydney

NOTES

1 Stefan Collini, ‘Liquored-Up’, London Review of Books, 17Nov. 2005, 15; John Wain, preface to id. (ed.), Edmund Wilson: The Man and his Work (New York, 1978), pp. viii-ix.2 Clive James, ‘The Poetry of Edmund Wilson’, in Wain (ed.),Edmund Wilson, p. 162; Philip French, Three Honest Men:Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. A Critical Mosaic (Manchester, 1980), p. 10.3

Edmund Wilson, ‘The Historical Interpretation of Literature’,in The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects(New York, 1948), pp. 260, 257.4 Louis Menand, ‘Edmund Wilson in his Times’, in Lewis M.Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections(Princeton, 1997), p. 253.




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5 Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Boston, 1995),p. 78.6 Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the

Real World (Princeton, 2005), pp. 77-8.7 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the1920s (New York, 1995), p. 160. On this topic, see alsoKermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy:The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia,1986), and Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Litera-ture Studies (Cambridge, 2007).8

Edmund Wilson, ‘The Critic Who Does Not Exist’, in TheShores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (1952), pp. 370-1.9 Irving Babbitt, ‘Humanism: An Essay at Definition’, inNorman Foerster (ed.), Humanism and America: Essays onthe Outlook of Modern Civilisation (1930; repr. Port Washing-ton, NY, 1967), p. 30.10 Norman Foerster, preface to Humanism and America,

pp. vi, xi.11 Norman Foerster, introduction to id. (ed.), The Reinterpreta-tion of American Literature: Some Contributions Toward theUnderstanding of its Historical Development (New York,1928), p. viii.12 Harry Hayden Clark, ‘American Literary History andAmerican Literature’, in Foerster (ed.), The Reinterpretation of American Literature, p. 190; Harry Hayden Clark, ‘Pandora’s

Box in American Fiction’, in Foerster (ed.), Humanism and America, pp. 203-4.13 Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 53; Lewis B. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (New York, 2005), p. 123.14 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr. New York,2004), p. 4; Edmund Wilson, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’, in The Shoresof Light , pp. 30-1.15

Edmund Wilson, ‘Prologue, 1952: Christian Gauss as aTeacher of Literature’, in The Shores of Light , p. 15; Wilson,‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’, p. 29.16 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, pp. 87, 123.17 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of theOriginal Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (1971), p. 1.

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18 Wilson, ‘Prologue, 1952’, pp. 8, 5, 11.19 Edmund Wilson, ‘Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull’, in TheTriple Thinkers, pp. 10-11, 6.20 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, pp. 95, 215.21 Edmund Wilson, ‘A Preface to Persius: Maudlin Meditationsin a Speakeasy’, in The Shores of Light , pp. 270, 267.22 Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 141.23 Paul Elmer More, ‘A Revival of Humanism’ (1930), in OnBeing Human (Princeton, 1936), pp. 15, 5, 7-8.24 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass

Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), p. 190.25 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the ImaginativeLiterature of 1870-1930 (1931; repr. New York, 2004),pp. 21, 233. Subsequent page references to this new editionfrom Farrar, Straus & Giroux are given in the text.26 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (ChapelHill, NC, 1939), p. 59.27 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (1969), p. 194.28 F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essayon the Nature of Poetry, 2nd edn. (New York, 1947), pp. 123-4.29 Dickstein, Mirror in the Roadway, p. 90; Frank Kermode,Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews, 1958-1961(1962), p. 58, and ‘Edmund Wilson’s Achievement’, Encounter,26/5 (May 1966), 65.30 Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in

Literature (New York, 1947), pp. 229-30.31 Ibid., pp. 1, 14.32 Ronald Berman, Fitzgerald–Wilson–Hemingway: Languageand Experience (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2003), pp. 44-5, 71. Onthis theme, see also Milton R. Stern, ‘Literary Criticism, theTwenties, and the New Historicism’, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, 2 (2003), 189-208.33

Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of theModern (Oxford, 1999), p. 152.34 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 105; Edmund Wilson, ‘GilbertSeldes and the Popular Arts’, in The Shores of Light , pp. 158-9.35 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925), in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (1956), p. 110.




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36 For Wilson’s view of Studies in Classic American Literature,see Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 96. For his response toLawrence, see Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks

and Diaries of the Period , ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1975),p. 120, and The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Lit-erature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It (Garden City, NY, 1943).37 Wilson, The Twenties, pp. 290, 421.38 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 113.39 David Castronovo, Edmund Wilson Revisited (New York,

1998), p. 103; John Updike, ‘Wilson’s Fiction: A PersonalAccount’, in Wain (ed.), Edmund Wilson, pp. 164, 173.40 Edmund Wilson, I Thought of Daisy (1929; repr. 1963),p. 206.41 Thomas B. Gilmore, Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (Chapel Hill, NC,1987), p. 170.42 Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 55.43

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘Patriotic Gore and the Introduction’,in Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections,p. 210; Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollectionsof Northern New York (1972), p. 218.44 Louis Menand, ‘Missionary’, New Yorker, 8 and 15 Aug.2005, 82-8.45 Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in theWriting and Acting of History, rev. edn. (1972), pp. 436, 558.

This sketch, ‘Karl Marx: A Prolet-Play’, was first published inPartisan Review in June 1938.46 Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; repr. Boston, 1984), p. xv.47 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Fruits of the MLA: II. Mark Twain’,New York Review of Books, 10 Oct. 1968, 12.48 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Fruits of the MLA: I. Their Wedding

Journey’, New York Review of Books, 26 Sept. 1968, 9-10.49 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Edmund Wilson at Oxford’, in Kai Erikson(ed.), Encounters (New Haven, 1989), pp. 13, 22.50 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 159.51 Edmund Wilson, ‘“Never Apologize, Never Explain”: TheArt of Evelyn Waugh’, in A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950

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(Garden City, NY, 1956), p. 266; Dabney, Edmund Wilson,p. 319.52 Randall Kennedy, Toni Morrison, et al., ‘Omissions in Patrio-tic Gore’, in Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflec-tions, p. 225.53 Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 394. On the planetary turn, seefor example Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (ed.), Shadesof the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Prince-ton, 2007).54 Barbara Epstein, ‘Wilson’s Romanticism’, in Dabney (ed.),

Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, pp. 37-8. On the hemi-spheric turn, see for example Caroline F. Levander and RobertS. Levine (eds.), Hemispheric American Studies (New Bruns-wick, NJ, 2008).55 Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, p. 1.56 Sven Birkerts, ‘Modernism and Mastery’, American Scholar,73/4 (Autumn 2004), 164.57 Characteristic of this scholarly genre is R. W. B. Lewis, The

American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in theNineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955).58 Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocationin Our Time (Urbana, Ill., 1965), p. 1.59 Leon Edel, ‘A Portrait of Edmund Wilson’, in Wilson, TheTwenties, p. xxxvi; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 180.60 Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), p. 104; StanleyEdgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York, 1948), p. 19.




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Documents

Essays in Criticism Volume 61 Issue 3 2011 [Doi 10.1093%2Fescrit%2Fcgr011] Giles, P. -- Axel's Castle